How lightning travels from the sky to the ground inspired the concept behind a new algorithmic approach to digitally separate individual trees from their forests in automatic forest mapping. “When lightning travels from the sky to the ground, it finds the path of least resistance through the atmosphere,” said Joshua Carpenter , a Ph.D. student in Purdue’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering. That led him to think the same way of his digital forest data, or point cloud. Carpenter and four Purdue co-authors published the details of their mapping methods recently in the journal Remote Sensing. The approach means the difference between mapping a few trees to mapping hundreds of acres at a time quickly and with high accuracy. It also could lead to making digital twins of forests, which could improve management planning in the face of climate change, disease outbreaks, and population growth.
